The Best Amendment challenges players to ponder guns and games

I suspect most mature gamers have, at some point, wrestled with the notion that their pastime involves deriving pleasure from gun violence.

As a reviewer of games that often feature guns, I go through periods when I think about the relationship between guns and games on a daily basis.

Hence my appreciation for The Best Amendment, the latest project from Paolo Pedercini’s Molleindustria Games, which makes interactive experiences bent on cultural analysis and social commentary (see: Faith Fighter, in which religious icons including Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad duke it out on a world stage, and Oiligarchy, which has players sapping the world of fossil fuels and corrupting governments).

As implied by its name, The Best Amendment riffs on the second amendment to the United States’ constitution, which guarantees the country’s citizens the right to keep and bear arms — an amendment currently the subject of some controversy thanks to multiple headline-making shootings over the last year.

Described on its website as an “unofficial NRA game” (in contrast to the official NRA game that was released earlier this year), players take on the role of a white, googly-eyed cone whose objective is to shoot black cones and steal the stars they drop.

The catch is that the black cones aren’t controlled by any artificial intelligence, but are instead previous iterations of your own white cone, the movements and shots of which are recorded and successively looped over each 10-second round.

Provocative quotes from people including NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre (“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”) and Ray Bradbury (“Good to evil seems evil”) pop up right in the middle of the action.

Between games we’re provided mock personality assessment messages like this one: “To continue playing we have to run a brief background check to ensure you did not engage in violent or antisocial activities in the past”.

The entire experience is set to Appalachianbanjo music.

In an interview with The Verge, Mr. Pedercini explained he “wanted to make a quick game whose mechanics are imbued with pro-gun rhetoric to the point of absurdity.”

And that’s exactly what he’s created: A game in which players control a gun-wielding good guy who kills gun-wielding bad guys while reading messages that would seem to legitimize their actions.

Of course, this overt bit of reverse-psychology leads to some pretty fundamental questions about guns, games, and gamers, the most obvious of which (and perhaps hardest to answer) is simply this: Why do so many people like guns and enjoy shooting games?

Digging a little deeper, the game is a patent criticism of the way in which both pro-gun activists and most shooting games tend to view the world as good versus evil, black versus white — represented here by the game’s black and white characters.

The unspoken question is obvious: Could the difference between good and evil be a matter of perspective? Those black cones we’re shooting are, after all, are versions of ourselves from the past, and when we were them we felt just as justified shooting other black cones as we do shooting these cones.

Players may even find some racial meaning — unintended but welcome, according to Mr. Pedercini — in the physical styling of these characters. The white cone clearly invokes a hooded member of the Klu Klux Klan while the black cones could easily be interpreted as his dark-skinned prey.

But perhaps the most subversive part of The Best Amendment is in how quickly players grow desensitized to the violence.

As time passed I began to think less about the game’s messages and focused instead simply on trying to win. The shooting and the social commentary become secondary to my quest to rack up the highest score I could so I could land myself on the online leaderboard.

Of course, this is what eventually happens in almost every shooting-based game. The virtual bullets, blood, and bodies become meaningless, obscured by our real goal, which is to prevail, to come in first, to experience the feeling of triumph. In which case, is all the shooting essential to the experience?

Perhaps contrary to appearance, Molleindustria’s game isn’t anti-shooter. I’m not even sure it’s anti-gun ownership. It is instead a meditation on guns and shooting games and their place in our world. It challenges people to question their appeal, to think about the impact they have on our culture, and, most importantly, to figure out what our own personal feelings on the subject really are.

At the very least, it should make you stop to consider whether there’s a deeper meaning to that gun you’ve spent hours obsessively upgrading the next time you play Call of Duty. And that’s not a bad thing.

The Second Amendment is a pay-what-you-want game for Windows PCs, Macs, and browsers. You can purchase it here.